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Tour de CLARIN: The ACDH Tool Gallery

Submitted by Karolina Badzm... on 12 September 2017

The ACDH Tool Gallery

In the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, the training of new and experienced researchers plays a very important role in guaranteeing a far-reaching utilisation of computation tools and digital methods. In Austria, the ACDH Tool Galleries are exemplary cases of such training endeavours. The Tool Galleries are user involvement events organized three times a year by the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH). At the galleries, the developers of tools and experienced professionals share their theoretical and practical knowledge on tools that are designed for Digital Humanities users. The events take the form of morning lectures and hands-on sessions in the afternoons; the practical work done is particularly valuable especially since it offers the attendees the chance to immediately consult with tool experts if they encounter a problem.

Eight Tool Galleries have been organized so far (a full list can be found here) and each was dedicated to presenting a different subfield in computational linguistics and related tools. For instance, the second Tool Gallery, which took place on 13 October 2015, focused on the importance and use of basic linguistic annotation and was intended for linguists and professionals from all disciplines. Annotation work on the Austrian Baroque Corpus (ABaC:us) and the Austrian Media Corpus was presented, while Marie Hinrichs and Claus Zinn from the University of Tübingen gave a talk on Weblicht, which is a fully functional processing chain that brings together linguistic tools such as tokenizers, part-of-speech taggers, and parsers.

Although the Tool Galleries were originally intended as a service for employees of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the format was soon extended to a much larger audience that now includes students and academics at all career stages. By organizing Tool Galleries three times a year, the Austrian Academy hopes to achieve a regularity and continuity that will serve as an exemplary model of researcher training.